[Source: Minutes of the General Assembly of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, 1880, page 100]

Another old, toilworn soldier has received his discharge and gone to rest under the shade of the trees beyond the river, until the glad trump of the resurrection morn shall call from their bivouac the veterans of the Cross to grand review and dress-parade, to pass under the immediate inspection of the Captain-General of their salvation, and hear the sweet welcome, "Enter ye into the joys of your Lord." Hence it becomes our painfully pleasing duty to prepare a brief memoir of the life and labors of our beloved brother McGaughy, who was the last but one who constituted the ministerial corps of the Bigby Presbytery, when we were inducted into the sacred office. The ministers of the Presbytery, convened in the town of Tuscumbia, Alabama, before whom we appeared as a novitiate, were Revs. C. P. Reed, T. B. Wilson, John C. Stephenson, W. M. D. McGaughy, and Wm. G. Oden, a licentiate. Absent, Sam'l Nelson, Robt. Bell, and David McClung. This was in October, 1833.

The next fall, at Mt. Comfort, Fayette county, Ala., we met the entire membership. Of all these but one only survives, brother Sam'l Nelson, of Alabama. (I hope if this meets brother Nelson's eye he will write me. It will be a voice coming across the dreary waste of forty years. Under him, on the circuit, we made our debut.)

Brother McGaughy was born in East Tennessee, May 17, 1801, and died at the residence of his oldest son, Rev. J. F. McGaughy, in Shelby county, West Tennessee, March 11, 1880, being nearly seventy-nine years of age. His father, James McGaughy, and elder of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, removed from East Tennessee to Middle Tennessee, early in this century, and in 1817 made a permanent settlement in what became Laurance county, Alabama; and together with two other brothers, Sam'l and Washington McGaughy, and others of the family connection, formed the neighborhood and church known ever after as Rock Spring. Our brother grew up, professed religion, and joined the church at that place. March 1, 1821, he married Miss Kezie Stewart, daughter of Rev. James Stewart, one of the fathers of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church. This union was blessed with six sons and one daughter. Four of these had preceded their father to the better land. In 1862 their mother died; and in 1865 brother McGaughy was married the second time to Miss Adaline McCord. She died in the fall of 1878, preceding him a year and a half.

The last thirteen years of his life was a period of intense bodily suffering. By a complication of diseases, beginning with pneumonia, then typhoid fever, and that frightful malady inflammatory rheumatism, which dislocated one of his hip joints, made him a cripple the remainder of his life. All this did not deter him from the delightful theme which had employed the happier days of his manhood. He would lie on his bed and preach to those who came to see him, and at church sit or stand on his crutches, and tell the sweet story of the Cross.

Brother McGaughy placed himself under the care of Bigby Presbytery in September, 1822. Having the care and responsibility of a family on his hands, he had to contend with an array of difficulties and hindrances to his progress as a novitiate. But manfully did he breast them all. He would labor on his farm all day, and at night seat himself by a lighted fire, and by the blazing fagots, study his Bible and the text-book given as his appointed task for examination at the next Presbytery. Thus by torch-light by night, and in the saddle on the circuit by day, he made such proficiency in his course of study as was adjudged by Presbytery popular to licensure. The dates of his licensure and ordination are not known to the writer.

It was the style of the preachers of that day to preach for immediate effect, and they were taught by their older brethren (those of 1800 revival) to expect a manifest work of the Spirit under every sermon, and it was generally conceded among them that the brother who preached had made a failure, if there were no visible fruits in the audience. To this regime our brother and his fellow novitiates were subjected, and the rule was rigidly applied. Hence they studied and applied what they gathered from their Bibles and text-books as they learned it. They were taught to seek and obtain in prayer the light and unction of the Holy Spirit before entering the pulpit. This method led to the choice of such texts and proof-texts for their sermons as would naturally harmonize with the presence and unction of the Holy Spirit. They preached no mere posthumous gospel, or a Christ once alive but then dead, but a living Christ once dead but alive forevermore. Thus trained, religion to him was a life, a concrete of all that makes up the sublime mystery of "God manifest in the flesh;" no dry abstraction; no dead theory; no mere assemblage of recognized principles of philosophy, but an embodiment of truths, the original of which are the theandric attributes of God in Christ, all animate and radiant with the light and glory of the eternal Spirit. With him the Bible was the central sun of all attainable knowledge. In all doubtful cases his appeal was to the Bible, the law, and the testimony. Not that he was destitute of science, but the Bible had preceded his study of science, and its teachings became so perfectly stereotyped in his mind that his thoughts whenever arrested or disturbed, turned, like the needle to the pole, to his Bible, and from that stronghold he could not be persuaded to beat a retreat.

There was the beautiful simplicity of the child in his intercourse and fellowship with his brethren that won the respect and conciliated the highest regard of the world as well as the brotherhood. No one of his large circle of friends and acquaintances ever suspected for a moment anything like insincerity in anything he might do or say. This was the free passport to the hearts of all which he maintained throughout a long and eventful life. Happy man! happy record! says the heart of like affection and simplicity to which our own responds in a hearty amen! But this attribute of his life and character had its antecedents in his parents and the domestic circle in which he was reared. The most unqualified affection and confidence marked the intercourse of his entire family connection. This home culture of heart, sanctified by religion, gave him happy prestige with all in his pastoral work. To the troubled and distressful heart he was a most welcome visitor, as well as to the sick bed of those languishing and dying. His parishioners and neighbors in distress had no hesitancy in leaning on his counsel, as dying Jacob upon the top of his staff. Eternity only can tell the amount of good he effected in his affectionate attention to, and regard for, the sick and dying.

After brother McGaughy had passed his novitiate in the mountains, on the circuit, and was ordained, the churches nearer his home became the field of his operations. He was pastor and collegiate pastor by turns at Rock Spring, Concord, Prospect, Moulton, Ebenezer, and Good Spring. These all (except the latter) lie within half a day's travel of his home, and in their service he spent the best days of his life. In the season of camp and protracted meetings he took a range as large as the bounds of his Presbytery, and sometimes in neighboring States. After the fall of 1838 the area of the Presbytery was reduced, and the name changed to McGready. In all this extensive evangelistic labor he was, to a great extent, self-sustaining. Sacrifice on the part of the ministry was the order of the day in planting and watering the churches in that country; and that state of things continued, to some extent, until the civil war disorganized society. He lived beloved and died regretted; for he was a man in his day, "A good man, and full of the Holy Ghost," and has gone to join his compeers in the paradise above, "where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest." "Write blessed are the dead that die in the Lord; yea, saith the Spirit, for they shall rest from their labors; and their works do follow them." Glory to God in the highest!--Amen.

[Source: The Cumberland Presbyterian, January 13, 1881, page 2]

OUR allusion to the parentage of our brother has awakened in memory a train of thought concerning the eldership of his day. They were men of power, had been chosen as the Cherethites and Pelethites by David our prince, armed with shield and buckler, sword and spear, and were the goodliest men in all Israel--mighty men of valor.

They prayed as no others I ever knew could. James and Ambrose McCord, Uncle Billy Johnson, and James McGaughy, father of our brother, and a host of others, all who came through the pentecost of 1800, have left none to bear their shields or bend their bows. When they fell to their knees and twanged their bowstrings, arrows flew thick and fast from the king's quiver to the hearts of his enemies. These men, modest as they were morally courageous, would take their young brethren who were preparing for the ministry in their arms, while kneeling in the altar, and pray for them as none but fathers could do who realize the burden of responsibility that rested on them. I used to feel that there was a holy, consecrating unction attending their prayers, and that the place where they knelt was holy ground, a sacred bethel, the house of God. O for the spirit of those days to return to the eldership of our times!

Is this foggyism? Let the boastful braggart, whose catchword is progress, remember that there were forty years of almost godless wanderings in the wilderness by the children of Israel, after the visible glory of God had consecrated the host and the tabernacle, from the blazing summit of Sinai. Progress in mere human learning is not evidence of piety and power in religion. Let him remember that a thousand years of darkness rested like a death-pall on the Church after the Pentecostal consecration on Mt. Zion. Let him remember especially that the life, the spirit of life from God, is the organizer, and the only conservative power of the Church. That all we presently have, in the artistic department of religion, is the offspring of the heavenly anointing of the Holy One; which descended upon our fathers in the great revival of 1800; and that already there are painful evidences of departed glory. Ichabod is written upon the escutcheons of too many of the domestic temples and altars of our Israel. How few families keep the domestic altar crowned with fresh offerings and smoking with the holy incense, as in those days of piety and power? Return, O Lord, to the thousands of Israel thy sanctuary, and the place of thy rest! Progress we have made in education, and are still making, and will continue to make, to the glory of our tabernacle. We will adorn it with all the costly trappings that art can contrive, with ram skins and badger skins, died red, and blue, and purple, with curtains of fine linen, hung on hooks and rings of pure gold; and with altar, whose brazen sheen shall glow like fine brass that burns in a furnace. But the practical question which involves the personal piety of both the individual member and the associate body as a whole, is to be determined by the offerings of the inner sanctuary, where stands the altar of incense, which receives the sprinkled blood of the Crucified One, consecrating heart and life to God.

[Source: The Cumberland Presbyterian, January 20, 1881, page 1]